My friend and former colleague, Figma's Andrew Hogan, raised interesting questions last week in his LinkedIn article entitled Design Indicators. Inspired by a popular LinkedIn post by Cameron Moll, he asked:
What makes it emotionally taxing to do design well?
Is it getting harder?
Are designers getting the time, space, and support they need?
Post-pandemic, burnout awareness is at an all-time high–especially in tech.
Talk of burnout is trending in many professional circles, perhaps ours especially. As Hogan pointed out, designers face a challenge few other professions face; they often have to convince other people to let them do the job they were hired to do. This is especially true for user-centered designers.
I’ve seen it firsthand: “While you were off interviewing users about what they need, we had to build something. It’s too late to use your designs now.”
And the classic: “There’s something about this I don’t quite like. Keep trying, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
Design work can be soul-crushing, for sure. But is it getting MORE draining?
The time crunch isn’t new. As humans, we never feel like we have enough time–especially in creative work, where the long tail of perfectionism and potential rework never reaches its end.
What has changed with UX design?
What IS new? Actually, it’s the overall support for UX, and interest in UX as a practice.
The early days of UX design were like pushing a rock up a hill. We were working from point zero to change organizations’ cultures. Last summer, cofounder of Adaptive Path Jesse James Garrett eloquently stated that UX was once “the obscure interest of a handful of practitioners.”
In the early days, we invested a lot of energy in making the case for why talking to users even made sense, and we got to do it only on special occasions.
But, as Garrett went on to say in the same piece, today “the field is huge and growing. And much of the actual design work is higher quality than it’s ever been.” We are still working to change organizations’ cultures, but not from point zero.
Business leaders know what user experience is, and why it’s important. Growing pay and increased access to training have ushered thousands worldwide into the practice. More companies are hiring designers, and those with design teams are hiring more designers than ever before. And as Hogan recently pointed out, we’ve even earned our own classification with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t think design work is getting harder. It’s always been hard. If anything, due in part to tools like Figma it’s getting easier (autolayout FTW!).
Here’s what’s really happening in UX
Rather, two of the reasons we hear so much about the emotional tax of the profession are:
The growing size of the design community.
The harsh realities one experiences as a newcomer to the field.
Because UX work is no longer niche, it’s being performed by a wider-than-ever range of people, not just an obscure handful of passionate practitioners. This stress-test has made the cracks more evident.
Our industry is training new UXers to do all the right steps. But one rarely gets to do them all, in practice. Employers are sometimes disappointed by the unrealistic expectations of newly trained UXers. And newly trained UXers are often disappointed by compromises organizations make with the design process.
These factors combine like a double-bounce on a trampoline–LOTS of new people, all realizing these harsh truths at the same time.
Infighting within product design
Another reason the emotional tax of design work has surfaced a lot lately is something that Andy Budd, founder and former CEO of ClearLeft, covered in a recent Twitter thread.
Budd said, “Product Managers have taken a huge chunk out of the design teams’ agency by framing insight gathering as ‘product discovery’.”
User research has gone upstream. That was the dream, right? It’s smart to start from users’ pain points. That’s one of the theses of UX. But it went upstream in a different boat.
That's where it gets complicated. Product managers use their own research to envision and prioritize potential solutions. Often, THAT is when they engage design and engineering.
But designers are trained that the only right way to design is to start with generative design research. They’re left asking, “Where did this idea come from? Why are we jumping to solutions?”
It can be demoralizing. As Budd calls out, designers often find themselves in execution, handed a long backlog of features to “knock out”. Is this what users actually need? What are users' pain points? What are users' mental models? Too late, didn’t ask about that, research is done, now it’s time for design. There’s little appetite for pulling designers off of design work to have them re-do the PM’s research.
Here at Slide UX, we provide user-centered design services to product teams. One of our leaders, Tom Drugan, hails from a product background. From our vantage point, we can clearly see the point of friction.
Ownership of user research is a key source of the emotional taxation Hogan describes. A UXer in training might expect that they’ll simply pop out the other end of the program to bestow good deeds of user-centered design upon the world. This might happen, but only once they:
Find someone who is willing to pluck them from the throngs of candidates vying for the same position AND
Convince that organization to let them do the job they were trained to do.
It’s a cold, humbling combo. While organizations are investing in UX more than ever, the dust hasn’t settled on who is going to do what. Many organizations are still figuring out how to best integrate UX into their workflows.
So, what’s the solution?
First, designers earn more influence when they learn how to communicate in terms of the business. To paraphrase Tom Greever, author of classic industry read Articulating Design Decisions, "the difference between a good and great designer is the ability to articulate how the design solves the problem." Is business-focused communication the gap that we need to close? Design training can emphasize not only how to design, but also how to communicate with the business. Organizations already reward the designers that communicate effectively.
Second, I think we should revisit the expectations we set with designers about research. We train designers that research is important (true!) but we also set the expectation that they’ll always perform upfront research themselves. This is patently false in many situations. That dissonance is a lot to carry around, especially given the self-critical nature of most designers, who feel like frauds because their organization doesn’t make space for them to do all their own research, every time.
But I’d argue that perhaps it can be OK. Not every initiative starts from the same place, and designers aren’t the only folks who perform research in many organizations.
Industry chatter would make it seem that it’s blasphemous to design something without having personally conducted the upfront research. What if we stopped shaming one another about this, and focused instead on the goal.
Generative research aims to understand the problem. Sometimes, the user and their problem is well understood. We tend to accept that generative research might be done by internal UX researchers or external research agencies. Should we accept that it might be done by the product teams? Can we work with them to get what they need?
Design should partner with Product to align on the questions that might influence design.
Many designers have been trained in proper user research. They can work with product teams on how to conduct research that’s more useful to design.
Product should invite Design to the table to ideate on solutions to the problems discovered in research.
Design should learn how to workshop with Product to get the answers they need to design great experiences, even when Design doesn’t conduct their own research.
At Slide UX, product teams are our sponsors and evangelists. There are plenty of times when we have to trust that the research has already been done, and do our best to extrapolate what we need to know from those who did the research.
This is where my head is currently at. I’m eager to hear where yours is. Comment below and in the meantime…
UX Authors to Follow
In honor of National Authors Day (Nov 1), here are five UX-oriented content creators you should follow:
Andrew Hogan studies experience design from the outside, as an industry analyst. He was a Principal Analyst at Forrester before moving over to Figma. His insights are consistently interesting and research-backed.
Cameron Moll has held roles at Meta and Pendo. He has been operating at the intersection of Design + Leadership for over 20 years.
Andy Budd’s long design tenure and current role as a startup consultant give him perspectives I often agree with. He’s willing to share observations others won't.
Jesse James Garrett was a cofounder at Adaptive Path, one of the original UX consultancies. He is now a design leadership coach, author, and speaker.
Tom Greever is the author of Articulating Design Decisions. He has led UX for well-known brands like Sam’s Club, Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., and Lowe’s.